Patchwork Girl, Hayles: 10/27

From Hayles’ essay “Flickering Connectivities”: we began to discuss some of her 8 definitions/characteristics of electronic hypertext that she goes on to apply to her interpretation of Patchwork Girl. I would suggest the best way to grasp her ideas would be to think less about the computer language and more about the way that same language has literary connotations. In other words, the way it can apply not just to the digital medium of PG (the computer, the software, etc) but to its story and content. For example, think of how suggestive these words are for this novel (and for Frankenstein as well): mutable, transformable, dynamic, fragmentation, recombination, distributed, piece, part, bits, multiple. 

We started to think about one of these concepts, “distributed cognitive environment” and how this demands what Hayles calls “cyborg reading practices.” Some left still scratching your heads; others admitted that, in effect, your dependence on computer mediation makes you a bit of a cyborg. So, perhaps we need to read PG more like you read Facebook or Wikipedia. What would that mean?

A note on the ‘difficulty’ of this text. We discussed how, ironically, one difficulty you are encountering is not that the technology is too sophisticated (compared to the technology of a book) but not sophisticated enough. Some put the CD in the computer and expected it to play. Instead, one has to play this text? Another difficulty I would suggest is in the content, in the story itself, not in the technology. Think of the title page; think of the multiplicity of authorship that is claimed there, and confusion (at least from the traditional perspective of a story/book being authored by a singular identity. This seems to be a story that questions the very idea of authorship. That’s not easy to read. But that is also difficult to read in book form. [Recall my point about the hypertext book novel I am struggling to finish: House of Leaves; perhaps I would do better to read it as a cyborg].

Note: I found my way, through the tag ‘patchwork girl,’ to this blog entry about PG that you might find useful or interesting.

The End of Literacy?

Recent article in Washington Post by Howard Gardner.

Reminds us that we have been dealing with changes in literacy ever since literacy began. The question is what kinds of literacies are emerging with new media.

We might apply Jackson’s novel here. Rather than argue it represents the end of literacy (in its remediation of the novel we exclusively associate with the book), one could argue that it so focuses on the processes of literacy, of how our literacy is distributed and mediated, always has been, that it brings our literacy into view. The problem, then, is that we get too much, not too little, literacy.

hypertext is bad writing

This is where I start to make some sense of Patchwork Girl: Jackson’s interest in hypertext writing as a resistance not just to traditional views of narrative or novel, but to conventional definitions of writing as such. In “Stitch Bitch” (I am reading ahead for next week, but also following up connections that Hayles makes in “Flickering Connectivities”; Hayles cites this as well) Jackson connects her understanding of the feminine, “banished body” at work in hypertext and at play in her novel with “what we learned to call bad writing.” So hypertext is a kind of writing that traditional (masucline) literature has edited out: a body and its loose aggregations.

This suggests to me that we are supposed to spend our time looking at this body (and multiplicitous embodiment) of writing; and are greatly helped in resisting the tendency to look through it, which is to say, look past it. She goes on to use the word ‘composite’; think how this resides in ‘composition.’

Hayles, in her analysis of the novel and in her contextualizing of its interest in 18th century discussions of authorship and copyright, provides a rationale for understanding the body of writing and the body of bodies. She connects Jackson’s interest in the (multiple) bodies of her text (author, character, novel, computer) to her argument for media specific analysis: it matters, Hayles asserts, which textual bodies we are dealing with when we write and read. Jackson goes even further: the bodies we write and read with matter as well.

I am curious, reader. Do you also view bad writing as bodily–as those elements of your writing that are in some way too physical, in need of surgery? Do you think, as Jackson seems to think, that we read with a body I wonder, certainly, where this finds us: we, in a composition and literature course, working on our writing and reading. And I wonder, I speculate, that engaging Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, with better attention to this sense, these senses, of an embodiment of writing and reading, will allow us to make more sense of the text. I would suggest that this way of making sense is one version of what Hayles means by “cyborg reading practices.” This is not about becoming plugged in, as in the cyborg of film; it is to recognize that we already are.

So, if you think Patchwork Girl is in some form bad writing and are having difficulties with it, you might be on to something.

By the way, for those interested, here is an electronic copy of Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, one of the many sources/intertexts/bodies that are taken up in Jackson’s composite. [thanks to Joanna for the reference]

Patchwork Girl: reading notes

Some of my notes from a couple reading sessions (saunterings?) with Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. For what they are worth.

 

Patchwork Girl.

The first question is one of pedagogy, preparing to read: how to assign it? I can’t give a page number. Is it about putting time in? is it closer to a game: play with it for an hour, see where you go?

 

[note: you can save each reading]

1st read (a 30 minute session): focus on looking AT: the presentation, the technology—begin to navigate, but reflecting on it as a technology of reading/writing—perhaps some ‘links’ you can make to discussions, to Birkerts, Hayles. Perhaps two of these sessions.

 

initial noticings:

• confronted with ‘navigation’–and different options to navigate and different ways to view the text: of course, something that might be familiar to us from any Word document (can shift to an outline view, etc); but an aspect of writing space (the term Bolter, creator of Storyspace, gives to each window of text), not familiar to us as readers. 
• marginal notes from the reading (which can be included in a keyword search): moving towards a wreading, writing while reading, if not the complete re-writing that some imagine for hypertext.
• save a particular reading: with implications that any and every particular reading of this text is going to be different, render a different text.

2nd read: work towards looking THROUGH—at least enough to hear/see a narrative, relations you see with Shelley’s text, some sense of what this narrative is ‘about’

 

3rd read: begin to put both toghether: track a way (with marginal notes) that you would argue is a strong way to read this narrative, perhaps starting to formulate a critical reading

4th: an alternate way, perhaps the ‘wrong way to read’? (or explore a reading you have missed?

 

5th: read in relation to her essay “Stitch Bitch”

 

Initial Notes:

First Session:

‘her,me’ [journal]: note the use of inscribe; ‘multiply estranged and gathered togethter in a dynamic union”

 

‘typographical’ [body of text]: implication of rhetoric, cites Quntillian, link between literary composition and fitting together of human body. So ‘monstrosity’ in writing would be when the rhetoric is not transparent (traces of process). Also seems to link to iconophobia—writing is not supposed to be seen.

Picked up furhter in ‘bodies’: where implication is that writing, like soul, must not be material sign (it nevertheless needs), must be disembodied.

“bodies too”: furhter aligns this with ‘contingency’ [echoes of metonymy]; and note that this monstrsoity of the legible and typographical includes grammatic error.

 

Second Session:

Begin at the graveyard. Use the storyspace map view, use to open/click various parts–and this allows the various windows to remain open [click on top of box, not in it]. Starts to feel like the creation of a poem; think of the blazon. Various parts coming together in the difference. That is, the poetics here seems to be about the making, and about the making not being subsumed by writer but re-interated by reader. Makes me think of Lanham and his notion of toggling between transparency and style, and rhetoric becoming poetics. This seems to be the subject here given that this is about making a body (and a making that is reflecting back on the embodiment of writing. [worth noting that I am using this notebook program/window while in storyspace--so further stitching/making. The technology of 'interoperability' seems to be relevant to the interoperability of organs. The making of a digital self/subject (dispersed, de-centered) as opposed to the centered self made by print reading (Lanham).

This section of the 'text' does indicate that the reader will have to put things together. Jackson's monstrosity, then, as the death of the traditional author? But aren't we reminded, as well, that the original Victor, is also a wreader? {and isn't 19th century technology also already digital: making subjects out of parts--think phrenology?]

 

Crazy Quilt section:

–misconception: can see the focus on body extending to critique of philosophy: identity/noncontradiction vs. multiplicity. Thus the monstrosity of Western philosophy is a multiplicity that has been associated with the feminine. [can tie here to how metonymy shows up in fenimist critique of composition, of technology]

–composition: notice how the reader is directly addressed/sutured into the narrative: you organize writing spaces by grouping them together on the screen. Whitman’s you; the you of looking AT; the you of digital spaces. Interesting that this is woven into a view of embodiment: multiplicity of sensations. [she is weaving in directions from storyspace--and the 'seam'd' lexia reminds us that this is always part of composition but traditional viewed as scar, ruining composition]

 

For discussion:

If this is a text about composition in pieces, writing that resists closure and transparency and even identity (that isn’t multiple, noncontradictory): can reading follow suit? Can our reading resist these expectations and still be ‘reading’? Is this what reading has become in the digital world–consider some examples? Can critical writing follow suit, and still be effective? How to do that? [consider Patchwork Girl as a critical reading/remediation of the novel? Just as a film is? Use this discussion to develop our senses/rhetoric of prose style for critical writing–and also (by way of Lanham) to consider that such hypertextual toggling is not new, not strictly postmodern. He points to futurism and dada. Can see it in Derrida or House of Leaves. But also in Whitman (as I read memoranda, or two rivulets) or Dickinson. Have you encountered pre-digital hypertext in your reading/writing before?

revision workshop: specificity

[1]An example of how specificity matters: Robert Pinsky, “Shirt”

We can use the language resources of poetry (the techniques of our medium) to be specific and focus your reader’s attention effectively and imaginatively. 

[2]Peer Response:

a)The writer’s thesis/critical vision (report it back):

b)Identify a place where the essay could or should be more specific in its focus on the film (as a film)and its interpretation of the novel. Suggest ways the writer can be more specific.

c)Identify a place where the essay is being specific in an effective way: explain what the specificity is.